


Proinsias Cassidy and the Bad Luck Kid

by Themoonlitknight



Category: Preacher (TV)
Genre: AU, But it will also be kinda dark, Cassidy is adorable and a big ol softie, F/M, Flawed characters, Friendship, Gen, It’s gonna be cute, Remember that chick that blew Cassidy while he was on a bender trying to get over tulip?, Vampires, canon typical gore and violence, fluffy I guess?, jesse and tulip and other will only make brief appearances, listen everyone in this series is batshit insane and OC will be no different, lmao let’s pretend that was Sharon, maybe romance? Unsure, melodramatic self-pitying assholes, people bonding over being awful, tbh this probs deserves an angst tag
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-17
Updated: 2018-07-17
Packaged: 2019-05-26 01:20:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14989631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Themoonlitknight/pseuds/Themoonlitknight
Summary: Cassidy, to no ones great surprise, becomes good friends with one of Annville’s local bartenders.Sharon, like many, is annoyed when she first meets Proinsias Cassidy.





	Proinsias Cassidy and the Bad Luck Kid

In a past life, Sharon Huntington must have been a truly terrible person. 

Not that she wasn’t in this life. She’d accepted that. But she’d always figured she’d been the average type of awful. The kind of person no one really liked but put up with anyway because they’d accepted that she wasn’t going anywhere. 

But then there were days like these that made her ponder that maybe she had once been a serial killer. 

On her way to the kitchen, she stepped, bare footed, into a cold pile of cat vomit. 

Fuck, maybe she’d been Eva Braun. 

It would explain a lot of things. 

“Fuckin’ asshole,” she sneered, and hobbled to the bathroom to clean off her foot. A handful of paper towels and a squirt of Windex took care of the puke, but the smell lingered in the air enough to make her gag. “Ma!” she shouted, though it was a useless endeavour. “I told you to stop feedin’ the cat that fuckin’ Spam shit. It makes ‘im sick!”  
There was no response. She hadn’t been expecting one. 

The kitchen was bright with the late morning sunshine, and the breeze that came in with it was hot upon Sharon’s already muggy skin. She had cleaned yesterday afternoon, had left the place smelling of lemon pledge and bleach. Or she thought she had. That familiar unnamed emotion simmered in her chest at the sight of discarded beer cans on the counter—some empty, some half full and tipped over to spill their sticky remnants across that imitation marble countertop. On the stove, a pot still sat on the burner—surprisingly turned off, small victories—its contents black and foamy and spilling over its rim and onto the stovetop. Sharon wanted to be mad, wanted to stomp and scream, but frankly she was impressed that the house was still standing. 

So she settled for carelessly throwing the pot into the sink with a loud, satisfying clang. 

She flicked on the coffee maker, added more grounds than necessary to make it especially strong. Gunned a lukewarm energy drink, because apparently her personality consisted of nothing more than sleep deprivation and caffeine addiction these days. The realization almost made her sad.

The can of the energy drink crunched beneath her fingers. She threw it to join the crusty pot in the sink. 

The fridge was almost empty, she’d needed to go grocery shopping for a few days now but hadn’t yet gotten around to it, passively observed the milk levels lowering and the eggs creeping ever closer to their expiration date. She grabbed one of those single serving yogurts and a bottle of water. The coffee clicked and she chugged down a hasty mug before making her way to the back room, water and yogurt in hand. She snatched a bag of pill bottles from the bathroom on the way. 

“Ma.” She knocked on the door at the very end of the hall, the pills in the bottle making a cacophony of rattling in the bag. Sharon didn’t wait for an answer, barged her way in and flicked on the light without ceremony. 

The room was dark and dank, the windows covered in tinfoil, the surfaces dusty, the floor in desperate need of a good vacuuming. The litter box in the corner needed to be cleaned out, but that wasn’t Sharon’s responsibility, and besides, she hated that stupid fucking cat anyway. She tossed the yogurt and water onto the unmade bed and poked at the lump of her mother’s sleeping body under the covers.

The lump groaned. 

“You need to take your medicine.” Sharon shook the bag again. There was a lot of medicine. As her mother slowly managed to sit herself up, Sharon went about opening the many bottles and counting out the correct number of tablets. 

Julia Huntington was old. She hadn’t taken care of herself in her youth and her face was lined and saggy, her hair thin. Her eyes were cloudy and unfocused, even when she was alert and having a good day, and her hands always shook when she reached out for her twice daily pills. She smelt of oncoming death, always had, and it made Sharon sick. 

“Make sure to eat the yogurt or your stomach’s gonna hurt,” Sharon reminded after Ma had dutifully swallowed the medication. Her eyes rolled beneath heavy eyelids, and Sharon stood to leave. 

“You forgo’ the spoon,” her mother slurred. 

“Your legs aren’t broken, are they?” Sharon spat. “Kitchens not far. I gotta go or I’m gonna be late.”

“Late for wha’?”

Sharon sighed deep and breathy, the way she had as a bitchy teenager. And now as a bitchy adult. “Work, Ma. I’ll be back by five, kay?”

No answer. Again, she didn’t expect one. She left the room and brought the bag of pills with her. Like the doctor told her. Ma wasn’t to be trusted with them alone in the house.

Part of her wondered why she cared.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Sharon was still like a teenager in many ways: carried a backpack instead of a purse, like a mature woman should; lived with her Ma; worked two shitty jobs to save money for a university education that seemed like a distant unreality. She was stagnant, a spider struggling through molasses. Sometimes it was okay. It was a life she was used to, one she could handle (for a couple more years at least). Sometimes, though, when she was pricing the latest order of beef from the factory, or helping that old Hendricks woman load her groceries into her car, or pouring a drink for the man she’d had a crush on in high school, who now had a beer belly and a house of his own and a job that allowed him to go on vacation to Florida if he so chose, Sharon would get hit with an emotion she’d rather not name, one that would leave her staring blankly for a moment, contemplating what the fuck had gone wrong in her life that she was nearly thirty and still living in the ho-dunk town she had vowed to escape, no better off than when she was fifteen. 

She knew what had gone wrong, and it made her boil with rage and helplessness at the fact that she could do nothing about it. 

After her shift at the grocery store, unable to face spending the three hours with her mother before her shift at the bar started, Sharon would spend as much time as she could justify at the diner, or the park, or the one roomed building that passed as a library, reading or solving crossword puzzles or looking at university guidebooks that only made her mad. Though she’d told her mother she would be home for five, Ma always forgot, and where Sharon once had to worry about being chewed out for being late she now worried over whether or not the house would still be there when she got back. 

It always was.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

“Uh, hey, Sharon?”

His voice was tight, tense. In the background, muffled under the music, was frantic shouting. 

“…everything alright there, Doug?”

Something smashed. More yelling. 

“Y’think you’d be able to come in? We’re gonna need some extra hands tonight.”

She sighed deep from within her chest and felt the weariness settle heavily upon her shoulders. Regardless, she shrugged. “Give me five minutes.”

The fight was getting louder, reaching a crescendo. “Thanks, hun.” And the line went dead, but Sharon kept the phone pressed against her ear and stared blankly at the wall. From the living room, her mother laughed obnoxiously at whatever late night game show re-run she had found. Sharon grabbed her keys and slipped out the side door without letting her know. 

Sharon lived closed to the bar. It was both a blessing and a curse, depending on the day. That night, as she pulled into the parking lot, she wasn’t quite sure what she would consider it. 

Maybe just a bit of bad luck overall. 

Two police cruisers were parked haphazardly in front of the bar, red-blue lights flashing and leaving spots in her vision. Two were unnecessary, she knew. The fights were never a big affair, and typically petered out after a few hits. But there was little else for the sheriff and his officers to do in a town small as Annville that wasn’t handing out traffic citations like candy on Halloween. Any promise of action and adrenaline, no matter how miniscule—whether it was a wild animal wandered onto main-street, kids fucking around with fireworks, or a simple barfight—ensured the immediate and enthusiastic response of the otherwise unoccupied sheriff’s department. 

Sharon parked in her typical spot, off to the side and out of the way from stumbling drunks looking for a place to piss or vomit. She cut the engine and stared through her windshield at the faded brick wall for a long moment. Men were still shouting. Well, a man was still shouting. His words quick and blurring together in an accent unfamiliar to ears used to a honky tonk drawl. Sharon sighed, tied back her hair in a poor attempt at a bun, and prepared to face the awaiting clusterfuck. 

The air was hot and smelt of grease and old booze. And there was Jesse Custer, the local preacher man, done up in his black clothes and his white collar looking like a sin, like something out of a teenage girl’s fantasy, back from wherever the hell he’d run off to save his backwater hometown with the word of God. His nose was bloody, his lip split, and he was being led in handcuffs to the back of Sherriff Root’s cruiser. Donny Schenck stood watching by the entrance, his arm—bloody and bruised and swollen—held protectively against his torso. Sharon wasn’t shocked, but neither did she care. 

There wasn’t a crowd—no one gave a shit about drunken fistfights—but several of Donny’s friends stood around looking pissed off and roughed up just enough to suggest this hadn’t been a fair fight. They nodded in acknowledgement when they saw her, always polite to the one bartender most likely to cut them off when they annoyed her just to be a bitch, to flaunt the modicum of power that she held over them. 

One man was still causing a scene, doing his best to turn a simple arrest into a spectacle. He was the one yelling, his accent British, maybe Scottish or something. He didn’t really fight the deputies escorting him so much as he squirmed and whined like a toddler protesting his bedtime. Like it was fun for him. Tall and lanky, covered with tattoos, his hair cut in that greaser fade, he looked like he hung around college bars and played in a shitty punk band. Finally, the officers managed to shove him into the same cruiser Jesse Custer was brooding in, and he squawked in indignation when the door was slammed carelessly in his face. 

For the first time in a long time, Sharon Huntington thanked her one struggling lucky star that she hadn’t been around to serve that chaotic mess of a human being. 

He kept up his yelling, muffled now behind the car door. Jesse Custer appeared to sink back into the seat and close his eyes in resignation. The deputies were smirking to themselves, speaking softly to each other and giggling like gossiping school girls. Sherriff Root looked tired, but he always did these days, and he wiped his hand over his face before getting into the car and driving off. Soon after the deputies left in their own car. Donny’s wife came to pick him up, and slowly everyone started to disperse until Sharon was the only one left standing in the parking lot, pondering a smouldering cigarette butt discarded on the ground next to her foot. 

“Sharon.”

Doug wasn’t that old, fifty tops, but he carried himself in such a way as to make people suspect that he had lived a much more difficult and interesting life than what he really had. His hair was long for someone his age, his beard grey and unkempt, and he wore corduroy jeans and embellished cowboy boots and gaudy, obnoxious Hawaiian shirts on a predictable rotation. Today was the green with red flowers, tomorrow would be the blue with pink flamingoes. 

His knuckles were scraped, the class ring on his middle finger dulled with blood. He never could help himself, always needed to get in a hit of his own when the fists started flying.  
“You gonna stand out here like a dumbass?”

She glared at him nastily and followed him into the bar. Inside, the stench of spilled beer was strong, and she spared a dry look to Brett mopping down the bar before taking in the full extent of the damage.

It was bad. Worse than she anticipated. She suspected that it had been more of a brawl than a simple fistfight. Tables had been overturned, chairs broken, bottles smashed. Puddles of beer and vomit decorated the rough hardwood floors, making them glint in the dimmed light. One of the light fixtures above the taps had been shattered, and several framed photos that had hung on the walls had been knocked down and trampled. 

Doug shoved a battered squeegee mop into her shaking hand. Brett sent her a forlorn look like a kicked puppy. Anger, hot and rancid boiled through her blood. 

“What the fuck did those assholes do to my bar?!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lol finally updated with a proper chapter. I have like, three solid chapters that I'm almost done/working on, but they're later chapters, so please be patient while I figure out how exactly I'm going to get to those chapters from here lmao
> 
> If you're a fan of Stranger Things and terrible trash humans, please check out MANIA by fresh_hellion. Her story is fantastic and gave me a lot of inspiration to start writing again after a very long hiatus.


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